Business books.

Portraits Of The Printed World's Proprietors, Predators

June 05, 1994|By Reviewed by Tim Jones, A Tribune media writer.

Paper Tigers: The latest, greatest newspaper tycoons

By Nicholas Coleridge

Birch Lane Press, 592 pages, $24.95

To many people it seemed only natural that Otis Chandler, scion of the founding family of the Los Angeles Times, would parlay his powerful name and influence into a run at a high public office. Yet he always passed up the opportunity.

"It's so temporary. Four years as governor, eight years as governor, then six years as a senator and you're gone," Chandler says. "A newspaper goes on and on and on."

So it is with the newspaper nobility, the dwindling breed of family press barons who still equate power with the printed word. Why put up with annoying voters and pesky reporters if you control what goes into the newspaper? Little wonder they cling tenaciously to their barrels of ink and giant rolls of newsprint.

And little wonder some spend themselves out of business.

In "Paper Tigers," Nicholas Coleridge offers a sometimes disjointed but often fascinating, funny collection of portraits of the world's newspaper tycoons, covering five continents and more than two dozen press barons in a breezy and entertaining fashion.

In many ways this is the print version of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," peeking into the minds of some of the biggest names in journalism-the Sulzbergers, the Grahams, Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and the late Robert Maxwell.

Some of the best material deals with lesser-known press barons, such as Samir Jain, the Indian press lord whose empire is led by The Times of India.

"In the old days at these newspapers we used to live like male lions in the desert near Jaiselmer. We used to eat but not to hunt," Jain says. "Now we hunt."

It is an observation that accurately reflects the nature of the newspaper business, where proprietors are also predators. In his chatty style, Coleridge draws a treasure chest of anecdotes from each of the owners, often regarding how they feel about each other and their papers.

There is Lord Rothermere of London's Daily Mail and Evening Standard, described as resembling "Babar the elephant." Rothermere says he does not know what he would do if he didn't have the newspapers. That would mean "I shall have to go to Jamaica and live in the sun, which is the last thing I want to do."

And there is the new breed of owner, such as Dean Singleton, whose flagships are the Denver Post and the Houston Post. In an unflattering portrait, the young Singleton's "cut and slash" philosophy of newspaper management is described as "1. Buy newspaper. 2. Cut staff. 3. Cut quality. 4. Cut objectivity. 5. Hike advertising rates."

Canadian Conrad Black, the new owner of the Chicago Sun-Times, is described as someone who "adores being a tycoon."

At the time of Black's purchase of the Sun-Times, his strategy had netted him 98 daily newspapers in the U.S. "We own a lot of little papers in the United States, and I'm ultimately the proprietor of them, but I never set foot in most of those towns and have never read most of them, ever," Black says.

It's easy to come away from this book wishing that Maxwell were still alive, if for no other reason than to continue his outrageous competition with Murdoch. Maxwell, the quintessential hands-on owner, was a horrible businessman with a delightful flair for self-promotion, Coleridge says.

Maxwell's photograph appeared 40 times in the New York Daily News during his first three weeks as owner. Newspapers were "a never-ending conduit for his insomnia and hyperactivity," Coleridge writes, not to mention his need for self-gratification.

"Look, mister," Maxwell once told an editor at London's Daily Mirror on being informed that the Soviets had sent troops to quell an uprising in Lithuania, "Don't you realize that Gorbachev wouldn't do anything without ringing me first?"

This is no scholarly read on the state of the newspaper industry, but it is a fun romp through a business run by people every bit as creative, eccentric and flawed as the people their newspapers like to write about.